Sarah Weakley and David Waite
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types’.
It is now commonplace for many academics within higher education institutions to simultaneously take on the roles of both knowledge producers and knowledge brokers in policy spaces as part of their everyday working. In these roles at the intersection of the evidence and policy nexus, they undertake traditional research activities but also engage with policy actors using their research ideas and expertise to change conversations and develop solutions to policy problems. In our new article in Evidence and Policy, ‘Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types’, we reflect on how ideas move within local policy spaces and the hands that move them. We considered this issue in the context our own work with local bodies in two different policy arenas – one looking at social recovery after Covid-19 and one focussed on socioeconomic change.
Ideas that move in local policy spaces
One of the important spaces that these brokers work is at the local level, with councillors, public servants and other policy actors that work in all phases of policy development, delivery and analysis. In contrast to the national level, we suggest that the local level can provide a productive space for brokers to make an impact with their engagement more readily with actors who both develop and deliver policy. In our cases, we deploy Smith’s (2013) idea types as a framework and draw attention to the shifting roles academics need to play given the churn between institutionalised ideas, critical ideas, charismatic ideas and chameleonic ideas.
Within the cases we looked at, a few key differences influenced how ideas moved in them. The first was the impetus for the local body itself, with one formed in response to the pandemic in the short-term (Case 1) and the second formed to support a long-term policy issue (Case 2). The second is the membership of the group itself – Case 1 had a growing membership based on the topics as they become more prominent during the phases of the crisis, while Case 2 had a smaller, more tightly defined group. Investigating these cases we found that local arenas can provide fertile spaces for charismatic and critical ideas to take hold, particularly where a new policy emphasis or compulsion is in place (Case 1). At the same time, institutional lock-ins in terms of the nature of evidence and recommendations sought may emerge (Case 2).
Who moves them: early career researchers
We find that, as with other research, the ideas that take hold in local policy discussions and spaces do so based on the people who are working with them. Indeed, we found that an important factor in our work is the positionality of us as early career researchers (here we consider ECR as someone within 7 years of PhD award). ECRs acting within the evidence-policy nexus often need to effectively maintain a series of relationships to achieve impact with multiple audiences as both a knowledge producer and broker. ECRs may be met with power differentials within the local policy space when working with other knowledge producers, lack of familiarity and therefore a lack of ‘authority’, and important career trade-offs when choosing if and how intensively to work as a knowledge broker.
In our cases we found that the agency of the ECR to put forward critical or charismatic ideas to the body was often influenced by the nature of the group’s remit (open/organic or tightly defined) and by the degree to which expectations were set upon the ECR as a knowledge broker and producer by the local body. An important trigger that enables agency on the part of the ECR to propose different ideas was the group membership itself – the elevated role for the third sector in the social recovery body enabled the academics to present charismatic ideas, often cross-sectoral in nature. In the socioeconomic change body, institutional arrangements and directives provided triggers for ECR agency; does the body want a report on progress, or new ideas on a policy issue? Finally, entrenched expectations and rigidities in policymaking during work within the evidence-policy nexus shaped how ideas beyond the institutionalised idea emerged; this includes characteristics such as the presence of a cross-cutting remit, clear questions to be addressed, broad agreement about what ‘social recovery/socioeconomic change’ is, and more.
This exploratory sketch of ECR policy engagement in a local space serves to show the merits of idiographic, case-based reflections. While the authors can draw lessons from these contexts, considering the mechanisms (agency, triggers, rigidities) in other contexts involving ECRs may be productively pursued.
Dr Sarah Weakley is a Research and Knowledge Exchange Lead at the College of Social Sciences at the University of Glasgow. Her areas of research include: poverty and inequality, social security and young people’s transitions to economic independence. Dr Weakley focuses on using social science research to investigate the nature of poverty and inequality, its impacts on individuals and society, and how government policy addresses or fails to address it. She is interested in work that improves the production and uptake of robust, policy-relevant evidence to improve the lives of adults and children living in poverty.
Dr David Waite is Lecturer in Urban Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research interests focus on the processes underpinning and the governance of second-tier city-region economies.
Image credit: Photo by Vardan Papikyan on Unsplash
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Weakley, S. and Waite, D. (2022). Academic knowledge brokering in local policy spaces: negotiating and implementing dynamic idea types. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/174426421X16638549272196.
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